21 comments on “Spent some time tweaking Chewie’s face this weekend, particularly his nose bridge needed correcting, which led to fixing the forehead”

  2. Somebody is going to notice this and offer you a makeup or effects job. I hope you like California. I’ve only been to Santa Barbara, which was infested by rich left-wing sprout munchers. I slept all night in LAX once, but that doesn’t count. I’m pretty sure the rest of the state is full of car thieves and blonde girls on roller skates. You probably won’t get outside much anyway. They’ll have you working on costumes for Warcraft II or something.

  3. LOL. I’ve never been to California. I’d love to see it, but I will never fly again and Chris hates to drive. Some day I’m sure it’ll happen.

    (The visit, not the FX job.)

  5. Too terrified. We flew to Florida and it was not happy. I mean, I lived, but my anxiety is worse instead of better as I get older. Not gonna happen.

    I’ve already pretty much confirmed that I seize when I get anxious now, so… yeah, not tempting fate. 😛

  8. Srsly though I know this sounds horrifically egotistical and shit but my Chewie looks more like Chewbacca than the one they used for The Force Awakens. 😛

  10. I love flying. I mean, the actual flying part. I can’t stand airports and sitting forever as a plane idles, so that’s why I don’t fly unless I have to. But I love takeoffs and looking out the window at quiltwork farm fields, etc.

    I flew a small plane once. Very fun. As you would imagine, takeoff is easy but landing is hard. Also, you want to drive the plane like a car and it’s weird having no surface under you. The plane naturally drifts on odd little currents, so it’s hard to get used to that and not over-correct. I don’t like it well enough to get a license or anything, but it’s neat as a one-time deal.

    Too bad they’ve ruined all the fun of commercial passenger flight.

  11. Also, it’s weird when you’re taxiing and lining up on a runway. Your instinct is to use the control wheel and brakes — very hard adjusting to foot pedal “steering” and just letting the plane slow to a stop. On landing, you REALLY want to use the brakes — very hard letting the flaps do the work.

  12. That’s awesome Sim.

    I think I would have liked trying that 20 years ago.

    Now, I enjoy simulators but no way am I going up in a small aircraft. 🙂

  14. No, it was a one-time thing. A guy was kind enough to let me almost crash his little airplane. It was a lot of fun but not enough to induce me to take lessons or anything.

    I’ve known a couple of guys who were crazy about flying — had their own planes and flew around every spare minute they got. Both, of course, crashed. One walked away. The other one didn’t. Recently, another person I knew died in a crash along with her whole family — the dad decided that he was skilled enough to fly in bad weather. The incident affected me badly.

    Private enthusiasts seem to crash a lot. There’s a vast difference between even the best amateur and your average professional commercial pilot. Flying is treacherous — professionals save lives every day and passengers never know it.

  15. Right, and I’m supposed to like flying? 🙂

    Sorry to hear about your friends. I’ve heard other similar stories about one member of a family thinking they were a great pilot and having similar results.

  16. The guy I mentioned who didn’t walk away — he was an excellent amateur pilot. You couldn’t ask for a more careful, attentive guy. He was obsessive about safety and following rules and all that; there was nothing reckless about him. The problem, I think, was that he misjudged the weather and what his plane could do.

    It seems to me that this is one of the big differences between avid hobbyists and commercial pilots. The latter just don’t make those bad judgments, or if they do it happens so rarely that it’s a big deal. And usually the judgment calls are about very technical things or the wrong reaction to something so unusual that the FAA has to go through long lists of possibilities to figure out what happened.

    Commercial pilots, 99.99% of the time, will err on the side of safety. They’ll delay flights or put people behind schedule to avoid risk — that kind of thing. It could be argued that their behaviors are safer because their airplanes have all this safety built into the machinery and instrumentation. That’s partly true, but mostly it’s because they have lots and lots of training and experience.

    You hear about the occasional drunk or coke snorter, but even now when flight pay and conditions are much less attractive than they used to be, they’re just not the same people as Jed Clampett flying around in his Cessna.

    Which is why I feel perfectly safe on commercial flights, even though nowadays airports are so screwed up I could probably drive somewhere faster than I could fly.

  17. Well I don’t mean to impugn your friend. But that’s what I meant. There’s a lot of stories about bad judgment calls involving whether to fly at all on a particular night at a particular time.

    Agreed that the entire airline industry in the country is completely screwed up. Along with many other industries/aspects of our economy. But we’re creating a lot of value for shareholders!

  21. Anyway yes, aside from wig hair, the most prominently used material on Chewie’s face is plain old clear silicone caulk. It’s the only thing that will stick to the silicone skin on his face. I used it for everything. Then lots of modeling pigment (used to simulate rust and weathering of various types on scale models and dioramas) to color around his eyes, lips, etc. And some cheap acrylics for his teeth and gums.

    Certainly not a full fledged creature shop in my kitchen…

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